The intense last day of school vibe that this episode has <3

Tuck in your goat testicles, it’s a bumpy ride!

Antigua and Barbuda

As with every international jaunt, the Caribbean leg of this competition starts with the Cooking For Locals On Slightly Inconvenient Outdoor Equipment Challenge, this time led by Maurine Bowers

they were split into two teams, this time opting for The Apprentice Rules and dividing along the gender lines (how very The Current Climate™) – so it’s Antos and Matt trying to Self-eliminate! at the Blue Gazebo

and Kristen very much accepting the hierarchy of things over in the Red Gazebo

she was there to eternally stir a pot of cornmeal and occasionally she might be allowed to chop a yam if she’s lucky

each team were making two components for their various Starters and Mains, except Matt and Antos who covering dessert because their Main course was mostly just a cremation chamber of lobsters

and Antos making a red snapper look like patient zero in a zombie apocalypse

their main course was the least enthusiastically received dish of the challenge, but I also think it was the least interesting dish of the episode and there’s only so aesthetically pleasing your mound of seafood can really look

I do always love this challenge for how well it introduces us and the contestants to new cuisines and ingredients. I hadn’t realised that Antigua had a signature pineapple, the Antiguan Black Pineapple, which is apparently particularly sweet, juicier and apparently dangerous? Although, I’m not sure we can entirely blame the pineapple for Matt deciding to grate it like he was competing against the island’s best pineapple grater

and because they’d used up every plaster in Antigua keeping Matt in one piece, they just started giving Kristen what I at first thought was a heavy duty gardening glove when she was finally freed from The Pot of Eternal Fungee and given access to a knife

their starter was Johnny Cakes (great name for a bard in D&D) stuffed with curried goat and a hopefully finger-free pineapple salsa

which were greatly received by everyone, with someone declaring it as “stealing the show”

to be fair, at this point it was only up against Matt and Antos’s Conch Snail and Fingertip Ceviche

but for not having ever touched or contemplated preparing a giant snail, Matt did a great job with it!
Each of the team’s had a signature more unusual ingredient – Matt and Antos preparing conch snails and Kristen armed with a fistful of pig’s tails

they were for their main course of Pepper Pot Stew, the national dish of Antigua and Kristen’s thirteenth reason

Kristen having at those pig’s tails like someone sending a pointed message to a soon-to-be ex-husband might be the highlight of the episode

especially when you compare it to Matt, burned by the pineapple grating, giving his coconut but the daintiest of taps

the Pepper Pot Stew was another resounding success for the Jhané and Kristen

as were the Fungee Croquettes that had been Kristen’s worst enemy – as well as having to stir it near constantly to avoid it creating lumps when all it wants to do is create lumps, she also had to add boiled okra to it. When she did add it, she hadn’t boiled it enough – a fact Maurine crept up behind her to inform her about like one of the vultures coming to tell Prometheus that it’s liver eating time again

meaning she had to do the whole laourious thing all over again – Kristen left that island with arms looking like Strong SpongeBob

but at least for all that work, everyone really enjoyed the Fungee Croquettes! So much so that there may have been a brawl for seconds

which left Matt and Antos to see the challenge out with their Ducana and Caramelised Pineapple that they were having to give the big sell like they work for Arnold Clark

and for all the strife they went through and fingertips they lost in the process, everyone did love their slightly distressingly grey dessert

I’d say it was probably their strongest dish? The Ceviche was good but the Ducana had more process than finely dicing a snail and throwing a big fruit into the fire and wishing it the best of luck

Lovely Jumby

For the next phase of The Great Caribbean Caper, the contestants were off to the delightful sounding Jumby Bay Island to work a service at the slightly less fun sounding The Estate House… why’s it called that, guys? WHY’S IT CALLED THAT, GUYS?

the head chef at said restaurant is Eustace Cabral Jr., who was nothing but an absolute delight the entire time

each of the contestants were given one of the four courses for the evening, starting with Matt making a Tortellini dish inspired by a caribbean street food called Goat Water

Eustace’s fine dining version was using the Goat Water base in order to make a Consomme, something that Matt at this point in the competition is incredibly well versed in, so that was the easier part for him

he’s less well versed in Whole Goat Manouvering

I want it known that the weird jumpcut is in the actual episode, and I can only imagine it’s because of the moment its testicles unceremoniously flop out is completely unbroadcastable

kind of obsessed that they made him lug this entire goat carcass, yoyoing testes and all, around like a scene from Dexter only to need just the shoulder

why wasn’t Antos having to dig pork tenderloins out of an entire sow? He just got to watch flaming breadfruit like a wizard contemplating his orb

the biggest hurdle for Matt though was managing to make the 50 tortellini needed for the roughly 15 covers – Eustace is not a schmuck, he’s generous with his portion sizes, anywhere else cooking food to his calibre would be giving you a single raviolo and telling you to deal with it. Matt didn’t manage to reach his tortellini target and the dish was downgraded to two tortellini

which is maybe why everyone was getting 6 pieces of pork on their main course

and they were LUCKY to get that because Antos spent 15 minutes disassociating in the walk-in freezer and was blindsided by the fact he was meant to be doing things

but you can get a lot done in 2 minutes when you go full on dead-eyed Terminator mode

and the diners were none the wiser to Antos ever having had a slight panic because he’d cooked that pork absolutely beautifully

but Antos wasn’t the only one losing it in the freezer as Kristen went to just stare at the grouper for a little bit

because she’d just found out she was to be making her mortal enemy all over again

her fungee making did go much better this time – I haven’t seen an Australian woman looking this happy to be unshackled since Nicole Kidman divorced Tom Cruise

and thus Kristen and cornmeal are once again on speaking terms – the emotional support grouper is another issue

you don’t become Antigua’s Chef of the Year by serving fish that looks like Antos murdered it

my favourite MasterChef tradition is Something Awful Happening To A Lobster so I think I can finally tick off that part of the Bingo square. I just need “So Close!! That is a sauce 💕” for a bingo

BINGO! I need to know the logic behind calling it a soup? It’s like when we made my brother go and ask the food truck in a car park in Wales for the “Hot chocolate soup” because their sign was written:

Hot Chocolate
Soup
£1

friends, Romans, that lobster that Antos obliterated… it was just Hot Chocolate and Soup being £1 – God, remember that economy?
Jhané was on Questionable Dessert Soup Duty with a Coconut Panna Cotta and various Pineapple bits and pieces and she should count herself lucky that she wasn’t having to make the little chocolate boat in the timeshare presentation for the Jumby Bay Island Hotel Complex

and she did phenomenally well, she didn’t even have to contemplate drinking on the job

so while Kristen left the Caribbean as the most swole wine aunt you’ve ever seen, Jhane had a job offer lined up

truly it’s Jhané’s world and we’re living in it.

Now You Do It

Having been given a thorough tour of Antiguan food in all its forms, it was now time for the contestants to devise their own dishes and host their own dinner over on Jumby Island, arriving at the restaurant looking like the kids from Stranger Things

But only after a shopping spree with the grocer of Mama Dupes, the true star of this episode

I know we’ve replaced John Torode on Celebrity MasterChef with John Torode Full Of Bees but I don’t think it’s too late to pivot and carry on the grand tradition of Greengrocer Sidekick on MasterChef

do we think Grace and Anna argued long and hard over which of them is The Gregg in their relationship? Because *technically* Anna replaced Gregg when he mysteriously died on the way to Greece during last year’s series. But Grace is getting the easier job of just appearing at the window to chat like she’s Lindi from Allegra’s Window (they have the same eye makeup… and quite often the same hairstyle)

while Anna performs the hard labour of having to trap Antos in the corner like he’s a bird that just flew into the kitchen to tell him to stop cooking like said panicking bird

the shades of Idiot Sandwich that this moment had <3

his big fluster started because he’d jumped the gun and started cooking his fish rather prematurely

and then left his, not entirely cooked, ducana out in the open to get cold and for Anna to stumble across like someone tripping down the stairs because their toddler left the FIsher Price Chatter Phone on the stairs AGAIN

and I can only imagine that they left so much footage of Antos frying Anna’s last nerves like he was frying breadfruit to gear up his elimination in the next episode AND I SWEAR TO GOD I WILL CRY!
His dish wasn’t a roaring success – he’d cooked the red snapper really well! His ducana was a bit too dense and his Jerk Sauce was underjerking

but we can blame old Jerkmaster Jhané for that one

you cannot just be calling people “Jerkmaster”, Antos! So while that jerk neophyte goes to find a Caribbean monastery to teach him how to jerk correctly, Jhane’s own hot sauce that she’d served alongside her Tamarind Glazed Pork Belly and Coconut Sambal could not have been better received

the trip to the Caribbean obviously meant a lot to all of them, but it clearly meant something so deeply personal to Jhané and seeing her doing so well and being celebrated so much by the Island was genuinely so lovely and I think her speech to the diners at the end might be the first time I’ve cried at MasterChef

or at least done happy tears, I was after all reduced to tears by most of what Michael cooked because, you know… THE TORTILLA WAS PURPLE, WHY WAS THE TORTILLA PURPLE, MICHAEL!?

I’m never not thinking about it.

Before Antos had slipped and lost 15 minutes of his life to a ducana induced psychosis, Kristen had cooked her first fungee-free meal of the caribbean, having earned being allowed to just make a Cured Grouper with a Pineapple and Tomato Consomme

she’d set out to make a starter that activates the tastebuds and gets them geared up for a full menu and she certainly achieved that.

So that leaves Matt with the dessert, and he had decided that he was going to make two of them because there’s nothing he loves more than a hotel buffet

his desserts of choice were a Rum Baba, a great choice for the Caribbean and its amazing rum selections, and a Coconut Panna Cotta

the consensus was that his rum baba could’ve been rummier than it was babbier but both were still really lovely. As is the fact he now has a catering team for his wedding

Antos is going to be handing out the canapés.